urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-97050e2c-bec8-4274-a3ee-4432f0a1f4bcIBM Software Community - Tags - assessment The IBM Software blog promotes thoughtful discussions and perspectives on how software is changing the way we live and do business.22015-07-17T23:37:26-04:00IBM Connections - Blogsurn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-43564e67-f311-42d7-bbd8-139b8acf24b1Smarter Workloads: Optimize the Outcome, Not the PlatformWes Simondsyokist@adelphia.net120000EFD6activebcde08b8-816c-42a8-aa37-5f1ce02470a9Comment EntriesLikes2012-04-24T06:58:05-04:002012-04-24T06:58:05-04:00In a previous blog entry I said that one of the surest roads to business success lies in understanding who customers are, what they want and how best to deliver that. But what happens when customers don't know what they want? This is a bit more awkward; now the organization has to help the customer figure that out. A pizzeria can make that happen with a menu... but most businesses don't have it quite so easy. <br><div>&nbsp;</div>Netflix tackled this type of challenge via its famous $1 million Netflix Prize. In 2009, the prize was awarded &lt; http://www.netflixprize.com/community/viewtopic.php?id=1537 &gt; to a group who came up with an algorithm that could accurately predict what kinds of movies Netflix customers would enjoy most. It could do this, in fact, more accurately than Netflix's own algorithm, generating results that were more than 10 percent better. That's pretty impressive given the incredible diversity in taste from one Netflix customer to the next.<br>&nbsp;<br>Modern IT vendors, whose customers' needs and goals vary just about as widely, have an even more difficult puzzle to solve. Typically, large IT infrastructures at established companies have evolved over time via a process that was more about Making Things Happen Now, and less about a long-term, governed plan of IT optimization. <br>&nbsp;<br>The upshot is that today, IT workloads are often executed in a way the customer can easily see isn't very efficient or cost-efficient. What isn't quite as clear is how to move to a superior arrangement. <br>&nbsp;<br>This, I think, explains the growing popularity of self-assessment tools in the IT world. Such tools, offered over the web, give organizations immediate insight into not just their needs, but also the available solutions -- often in a surprisingly accurate way, following a Q&amp;A process. <br>&nbsp;<br>These tools offer, in a limited sense, free consulting. And if implemented well, they can significantly shorten the path any given organization has to take toward creating a better, more optimized IT infrastructure.<br>&nbsp;<br><b>Platforms are just tools -- be sure you've got the right tool for the job</b><br>So given this context, it was a pleasure talking to Penny Hill, a marketing manager with IBM Software Group who recently helped develop <a href="http://www.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/workloadtools/">two such tools</a>.<br>&nbsp;<br>Hill reminded me that IBM's focus these days is less on the details of a given platform than on the business value it creates over time. She also suggested that this is an area of ‘low-hanging fruit,’ where organizations can often make rapid headway because they've barely gotten started.<br>&nbsp;<br>‘It's crazy,’ she told me, ‘that organizations continue to argue over the merits of a platform vs. looking at the workload characteristics that are best suited for the right platform.’<br>&nbsp;<br>That strikes me as a really good point. In the time I spent in IT, platform choice was often taken for granted in advance for all workloads -- relatively low-end x86 boxes running Windows or Linux being by far the most common platform. <br>&nbsp;<br>Then, based on that assumption, subsequent questions were asked: ‘How can we accomplish such-and-such on our platform?’ <br>&nbsp;<br>The concept that different workloads have different characteristics, require different resources and are better-suited or worse-suited to different platforms was really never taken into account. So the eventual business outcome was rarely as good as it might have been.<br>&nbsp;<br>Distributed architectures aren't always the rule, either. At institutions like banks, mainframe computing has often held sway as the dominant platform largely because, well... it held sway in the past, going back half a century in some cases. But organizations should look at their current platform as well as others to make workload decisions <br>&nbsp;<br>What Hill has recently worked on for IBM are two different tools that give organizations a new perspective on this whole area. If you consider distributed architectures and mainframe architectures as the two fundamental approaches, the next logical questions are: What kinds of workloads are best suited to each?&nbsp; And what kinds of variables should an organization consider to match platforms with workloads in every case?<br>&nbsp;<br>Hill suggests that this switch in perspective -- from platform-prioritized to workload-prioritized -- has a natural analogy in a familiar area.<br>&nbsp;<br>‘Choosing the best-fit platform should be like buying a car,’ she said. ‘You typically look at the qualities you're looking for, i.e., good gas mileage, safety, Sirius radio, and then search for the car that meets these needs. What you don't do is pick the car first, and then try to force-fit in these characteristics.’<br>&nbsp;<br><b>A tailored white paper of your very own</b><br>This is why both of the IBM assessment tools put the focus directly on workload characteristics -- albeit in very different ways.<br>&nbsp;<br>The first tool, believe it or not, actually generates a customized white paper. Following a short series of questions on mainframe ownership, workload type, number of users and the relative importance of efficiency, reliability, scalability, security and utilization, this <a href="https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/signup.do?source=swg-Dynamicwp">white paper</a> can be downloaded straight to your hard drive in Word format. <br>&nbsp;<br>Additional questions might appear depending on your answers to the above. For instance, if your workload involves data warehousing, you'll also be asked the total volume of data in terabytes. <br>&nbsp;<br>While the white paper is generated based on predefined content created by IBM partner IDC, the content is nevertheless chosen based on your answers, and combined in a way that will more closely reflect your particular IT context than any other white paper you are likely to find. <br>&nbsp;<br>And as a result, it should provide unusually specific insight into the probable challenges that apply, and provide helpful recommendations concerning the pros and cons of different platforms and workload migration strategies.<br>&nbsp;<br><b>Interactive assessment: It's what all the cool companies are doing</b><br>The <a href="http://www.systemzassessmenttool.com/">second assessment tool</a> offers an interactive experience based on your answers to three different sections. &nbsp;<br>&nbsp;<br>The first section lets you define up to five different named workloads; for each, you'll need to provide both the workload's task (analytics, transaction processing, etc.) and current platform (whether distributed or mainframe).<br>&nbsp;<br>The focus in the second section is on the characteristics of those workloads. For each, you'll need to specify eight different traits -- staff skill level, software license costs, capacity and so forth. <br>&nbsp;<br>In the third section, you describe the characteristics of your current data center.&nbsp; Here, too, there are eight traits to consider, ranging from floor space to hardware maintenance costs to storage and energy costs. <br>&nbsp;<br>Once you've finished your self-assessment, the tool then provides results for all your workloads. You can actually see whether a distributed model or a mainframe model is likely to yield optimal performance in each case, based on your specified criteria, via a color-coded model. And if you'd like to adjust your previous answers, to see if the results change, you can do that, too.<br>&nbsp;<br>I found it interesting, entering different combinations to see what kind of results I'd get. Based on the sample sets I gave the tool, it appears my imaginary companies have invested too much in distributed architectures -- not too surprising, really, given the widespread canard that distributed computing is intrinsically less expensive. Quite often, due to hilariously low utilization levels and frighteningly high energy costs, it's the other way around.<br>&nbsp;<br>Hill endorses both tools as a way not just to assess your current situation, but also plan for future scenarios. Since the tool lets you enter any values you please, you can test not just the values that apply right now, but those you expect to apply in the foreseeable future. <br>&nbsp;<br>The results might surprise you -- in a good way.<br>&nbsp;<br>‘Looking at the right-fit platform strategy is often a major mind-shift in the IT world,’ said Hill. ‘But once embraced, it opens the doors to major cost reductions and a smarter, more optimized data center architecture -- put simply, smarter computing.’<br>&nbsp;<br><b>Additional Information</b><br>&nbsp;<br><b><a href="http://www.ibm.com/software/os/systemz/workloadtools/">Try out these workload assessment tools for yourself</a></b><br>&nbsp;<br><b><a href="http://www.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/category/SWY00">Learn more about Enterprise Modernization</a></b><br>&nbsp;<b><br><a href="http://www.ibm.com/systems/data/flash/smartercomputing/">Find out how you can experience smarter computing today</a></b><br>&nbsp;<br><b>About the author</b><br><i>Guest blogger Wes Simonds worked in IT for seven years before becoming a technology writer on topics including virtualization, cloud computing and service management. He lives in sunny Austin, Texas and believes Mexican food should always be served with queso</i><br>
In a previous blog entry I said that one of the surest roads to business success lies in understanding who customers are, what they want and how best to deliver that. But what happens when customers don't know what they want? This is a bit more awkward; now...006254urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-97050e2c-bec8-4274-a3ee-4432f0a1f4bcIBM Software Community2015-07-17T23:37:26-04:00urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-a7a59e70-a424-4d37-9e2d-dc8a12965320Flip on your high-beams – smarter risk assessment lies ahead at Vision 2012Wes Simondsyokist@adelphia.net120000EFD6activebcde08b8-816c-42a8-aa37-5f1ce02470a9Comment EntriesLikes2012-04-17T07:31:22-04:002012-04-17T07:34:35-04:00<div>Tell me if this sounds familiar: You're pondering whether to do something potentially risky -- perhaps quit a job, switch to a completely different career path or even start a business. You have many motives to do so, yet the road ahead seems very unclear, and you're uncomfortable with that. And someone else says, ‘Oh, go for it. Everything in life is risky.&nbsp; You could get hit by a bus any day... but that doesn't stop you from leaving the house.’<br>&nbsp;<br>Well, that’s true, of course, but as an argument it has a really basic problem: it's number-free. <br>&nbsp;<br>Not all risks, in other words, are the same. The risk of getting hit by a bus is different from, and much smaller than, the risk of starting a business, watching as it slowly fails and getting into deep debt.<br>&nbsp;<br>Making such a decision reasonably competently means finding a way to clarify, quantify and prioritize the kinds of risks you're facing in a given strategy -- and weighing them against the benefit you're trying to create.<br>&nbsp;<br>This, in essence, is a problem confronted every day by businesses making complex decisions. They'd like to create improvements or pursue new goals in a given area. But in a perfect world, they'd also like to avoid getting hit by a bus.<br>&nbsp;<br>By no coincidence, this is also a major focus of IBM's considerable interest in advanced business analytics -- recently described by Mike Rhodin, Vice President of IBM Solutions Group, as ‘the silver thread woven throughout our portfolio.’ Risk assessment and mitigation are central to business strategies -- almost all strategies, in almost all industries. And advanced analytics can deliver some of the best available insight to accomplish that.<br>&nbsp;<br><b>Get a moment of clarity -- actually, get lots of them</b><br>Toward getting a little more clarity about this area, I talked to John Kelly, Worldwide Market Segment Manager for IBM's Business Analytics group about IBM's perspective in this area... and how that perspective is going to be explored at the forthcoming <a href="http://www.ibm.com/software/analytics/vision/">Vision 2012</a> conference to be held from May 14-17 at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando.<br>&nbsp;<br>Like me, Kelly sees analytics as a powerful visualization tool -- a way to understand different possible futures, and steer your organization into a future that offers more benefit and lower risk.&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;<br>‘Customers are looking to improve decision making and business performance through increased insight and business intelligence,’ he said. ‘That's exactly why IBM has recently labeled analytics as one of our four major strategic directions -- we know how much potential this area really has. And we'd like our clients to realize as much of that potential as possible.’<br>&nbsp;<br>Risk assessment and mitigation, of course, have a long history in some areas (like finance) and are less well understood and established in other areas (like technology startups), but the root appeal remains the same in every case. If you want to get the best possible outcome, you need to establish the most likely, and most potentially devastating, pitfalls. <br>&nbsp;<br>Analytics tools can work almost like a car's high-beams, helping you navigate and get where you're trying to go more safely. That's a goal that almost any business leader, in any industry, at any organization of any size, can understand and appreciate.<br>&nbsp;<br><b>Regulatory compliance stands out as a growing challenge</b><br>And beyond that general value proposition, IBM is making considerable strides in applying analytics effectively in areas that are of particular concern to its clients. One such area: regulatory compliance and policy management.<br>&nbsp;<br>In the wake of major scandals dating back more than a decade, these regulations have increasingly been created with the stated goal of minimizing various forms of unacceptable risk to the public, to business employees and customers as well as to stockholders. And that, of course, is a laudable goal. <br>&nbsp;<br>But complying with those regulations can be a headache even for the best-intentioned organizations that are really committed to compliance and dedicating tremendous resources to the job. Even when compliance seems to have been achieved, it hasn't always been. New regulations appear every year; it's not the easiest thing in the world to know which apply in a given case, and under what conditions, and what the best organizational response should be.<br>&nbsp;<br>IBM, it seems, can help. ‘Our solutions deliver analysis and reporting, to provide visibility into the state of risk in the enterprise including evidence of compliance or remediation status, trending and point-in-time analysis and ad hoc querying,’ said Kelly. <br>&nbsp;<br>Consider what that means in practical terms. Not only can you understand much more clearly, quickly and easily the extent to which your organization is in compliance, but you can also demonstrate that compliance on demand, in whatever level of detail is required. In the event of an audit, such a demonstration will be essential -- and avoiding potentially hefty penalties and fees will be much simpler. What organization wouldn't be interested in solutions like that?<br>&nbsp;<br>One solution family drawn from IBM's analytics portfolio is particularly strong in the area of compliance and risk: <a href="http://www.ibm.com/software/analytics/openpages/solutions.html">IBM OpenPages</a>. This suite of tools focuses specifically on governance, risk and compliance, not just identifying and monitoring risk, but also putting in place a programmatic way to communicate and manage risk exposure across the enterprise to reduce unexpected losses, penalty and fines (not to mention reputational damage), while at the same time improving decision making.<br>&nbsp;<br>Its compliance capabilities, for instance, are directly on point. Organizations routinely create (and enforce) policies to drive compliance... but not always in as governed and coherent a fashion as they might. (Banking industry, I'm looking at you when I say that.) <br>&nbsp;<br><a href="http://www.ibm.com/software/analytics/openpages/products/policy-compliance-management/">OpenPages Policy and Compliance Management</a> automates the lifecycle of compliance policies from cradle to grave, reducing redundancy and optimizing the policies you keep in a way that spans resources, business groups, projects and workflow.&nbsp; Organizations that have a formal implementation of risk mitigation, but would like to tune or enhance it to better align with their current and future needs (not to mention future regulations), will find this solution particularly compelling.<br>&nbsp;<br><b>A better outcome can result from risk-aware decision making</b><br>Risk management is increasingly becoming a strategic, executive-sponsored solution that many organizations view as providing a competitive advantage where risk and performance are aligned and where governance, risk and compliance is part of “annual strategic planning”.<br>&nbsp;<br>An integrated governance, risk and compliance program also has a wealth of information that can be leveraged for risk-aware decisions. Through business intelligence and reporting, information from an integrated program is being utilized beyond the risk and compliance office and being leveraged by business managers to make risk-informed decisions about resource and investment allocations in product planning. <br><br>Optimize your risk management strategies in many dimensions<br>Other OpenPages solutions -- which inter-operate with each other, via a shared foundation of data -- are available to deliver similar capabilities in related fields like: <br>&nbsp;<br><ul><li>Operational risk management. This offering can identify, manage, monitor and analyze operational risks of all types, all from a single point of command to spur a particularly agile response. From better, more accurate insight comes a faster and more comprehensive remediation.</li></ul><ul><li>Financial controls management: Regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley in the United States are mirrored by similar regulations in other countries around the world -- and for global organizations, each crossed border represents a new set of financial regulations with which to comply. This solution focuses on reporting, offering a centralized architecture for analysis, documentation and data management.</li></ul><ul><li>IT governance. IT has become central to almost everything organizations do today. As a result, risk assessment for IT assets, services and data is needed to ensure that IT delivers the intended value -- ideally, on time and under budget -- even in the case of complex projects that take years to complete.</li></ul><ul><li>Internal audit management. For large organizations that proactively conduct audits of their own, this solution is a natural fit. Using it, they can automate many of the basic processes involved, as well as connect the results logically to other risk assessment initiatives they have in place.</li></ul>&nbsp;<br>Anyone interested in getting more information on these and related topics should definitely consider attending the previously mentioned Vision 2012 conference.&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;<br>This is the premier global conference for finance and risk professionals, and the most high-profile stage for IBM to discuss everything it has to offer in this rapidly evolving, increasingly hot area. <br>&nbsp;<br>When I asked Kelly to sum up in a nutshell what IBM will be discussing at Vision 2012, he said this: <br>&nbsp;<br>‘IBM Risk Analytics enables the Smarter Analytics approach -- turning risk information into insight, and insight into better business outcomes.’<br>&nbsp;<br>I like the sound of that.<br>&nbsp;<br><b>Additional Information</b><br>&nbsp;<br><b><a href="http://www.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/category/SWQ00">Learn how Business Analytics improves business performance</a></b><br>&nbsp; <br><b><a href="http://www.ibm.com/software/analytics/vision/">See what Vision 2012 offers for finance and risk management professionals</a></b><br>&nbsp; <b><br><a href="http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/business_analytics/ideas/index.html">Gain relevant business insight through Smarter Analytics</a></b><br>&nbsp; <br><b><a href="http://www.ibm.com/software/data/industry/banking.html">Smarter Analytics for the financial industry</a></b><br>&nbsp;<br><b>About the author</b><br><i>Guest blogger Wes Simonds worked in IT for seven years before becoming a technology writer on topics including virtualization, cloud computing and service management. He lives in sunny Austin, Texas and believes Mexican food should always be served with queso.</i></div>
Tell me if this sounds familiar: You're pondering whether to do something potentially risky -- perhaps quit a job, switch to a completely different career path or even start a business. You have many motives to do so, yet the road ahead seems very unclear, and...006837urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-97050e2c-bec8-4274-a3ee-4432f0a1f4bcIBM Software Community2015-07-17T23:37:26-04:00